Radio Free Mike

a berlin blog

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

The War Against America

Andrew Sullivan is touting this piece in the Washington Post as fine evidence that the flypaper strategy is working: We invaded Iraq to create a battlefield against terrorists on their own turf, to distract them from bringing their war against America over to our shores. Josh Marshall is skeptical. "The [Iraq] war itself," he writes, "-- the supposed remedy for the tie between Iraq and al Qaida -- ended up making the Iraq/al Qaida mumbo-jumbo into a reality." That's obviously a lot closer to the truth. And the CIA predicted it: "Last fall, in a classified assessment of Iraq," writes Steven Chapman, to take just one report of a "secret" memo that's now rather well picked-over, "the CIA said the only thing that might induce Saddam Hussein to give weapons to terrorists was an American invasion."

Iraq, in other words, is Arabic for Afghanistan.* Al Qaeda has teamed up with Ba'athists because of the war, and parts of the Iraqi countryside (like Afghanistan in the 1980s) will serve as a new training ground for young bin Ladens to organize against an evil superpower. Will that distract Al Qaeda, really? Will it keep terrorists from attacking us here? Or is it just a blowhard's excuse for some heavy miscalculation? I want to believe Sullivan's anxious cheerleading, I really do. But when he writes, "The U.S. did everything to win the support of as many countries as we could for a war which many, frankly, do not have the stomach to fight," he might as well excuse himself from the planet. The U.S. did everything to win U.N. support except tell the truth. Europe looked at our evidence -- on weapons of mass destruction and Baghdad's links to Al Qaeda -- and said, "Is this all you have?" And now we see the result.

*Republican bumper sticker from the 1980s: "Nicaragua is Spanish for Afghanistan."

posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:10 AM

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